by Mark Lawson
He was startled by footsteps outside the door, then remembered where they were. A toilet flush was followed by fast feet on carpet. Tom, he guessed, from the heavier tread.
‘So is she alive?’ he asked.
‘Who?’
‘The wife.’
‘Oh. It seems like it. We’ve just discovered that the fire in which she died’ – with a hand lifted from the page she put inverted commas around the verb – ‘left the body unidentifiable.’
They were keeping their voices low to avoid disturbing the Pimms in the next room.
‘So why go to the trouble of faking your death and then start texting hubby?’
‘I know. There’s another hundred pages to go. But it seems that Harper had a psychopathic ex-lover. So either she’s escaping from him to start a secret new life with Scott. Or Gabriel has already killed Harper and now he’s pretending to be her to lure Scott.’
‘Mmm,’ Ned said. ‘Or it was Gabriel in the blaze. And the texts really are from Harper. Having done in her lover, she’s now luring her husband for a twofer because she’s secretly got someone else.’
Emma laughed. It felt easier between them than it had been since. Since. ‘That would be pretty far-fetched wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes. But that sort of book is about fetching far. The solutions aren’t about human motivation or plausibility. They’re about the outcome the reader is least likely to guess.’
‘I’ll let you know if you’re right.’
‘Why are you reading it?’
‘Because this woman is going to make someone a lot of money. And we might …’
Need it were the words she cut off. As apology, she did not move her legs away when his touched them.
They need not have worried, it turned out, about disturbing the others. The sub-division of the house into apartments had used thin interior materials and, from the other bedroom, leaked a low murmur of gossip and giggling and then a soundtrack unmistakeable, although still impressive in a long marriage: the rhythmic creak of bed springs, then breathlessness and a climactic grunt. Ned guessed that the Pimms were celebrating their daughter in the most appropriate way.
Nostalgia and competition began to arouse him.
‘Some people are having fun,’ he whispered.
‘What?’
‘The Pimms are … coupling.’
‘What? Really? I hadn’t noticed.’
Ned moved closer, so that she would feel the thickening pressure against her leg.
‘Oh,’ Emma said.
The disgrace or the drugs – or doubt about her reaction – had damaged his desire. Even if she wanted to, he probably wouldn’t be able to. In crises of desire, it had usually been enough to touch her inside. He tried. Unusually, she was wearing knickers.
‘Oh,’ he asked, ‘are you bleeding?’
It struck him that this excuse – even if a lie – might be a relief all round. But she said: ‘No.’
‘Oh.’
‘Sweetheart, I don’t think I can. It’s not the … it’s the …’
The omitted words were as stinging as if she had spoken them. The terrible eloquence of the unsaid. His third Edinburgh rejection.
Turning from her, he reached for his paperback. She adjusted the wide, bound pages on her raised knees. They read in silence.
The Literature of False Accusation (7)
Summary: Twice-divorced David Lurie, fifty-two, a professor of Communications (previously known as English Literature) at the Technical University of Cape Town, screws a twenty-year-old student, Melanie Isaacs, a promising actress, on the floor of his house. Subsequently, they have sex again at her shared flat and then once more at Lurie’s house, into which she briefly moves, apparently after a row with her boyfriend.
The professor is visited in his office – and has a lecture and a theatre trip disrupted by – the woman’s boyfriend, who knows about their relationship. After Melanie withdraws from his seminar on the romantic poets, she brings a charge of sexual harassment under Article 3.1 of the university’s Code of Conduct, to which the college adds an allegation of falsifying records to disguise Ms Isaacs’ absence from lessons and a test.
When Lurie appears before a panel, chaired by the Professor of Religious Studies and comprising senior staff and a student representative, he is reassured that this is not a trial but a hearing, which will come to no decisions but merely make a recommendation to the college authorities, and that his identity will not be revealed. Lurie admits both charges but, ordered also to make a full confession and apology and to undergo sensitivity retraining, refuses and chooses to leave.
With the aim of turning his forced hiatus to advantage, Lurie stays with his daughter, Lucy, at her farm in the Cape, where he intends to write a long-contemplated opera about Byron. During the visit, he serves as a junior assistant to Lucy and her black farm manager, driving with them at dawn to sell the land-grown produce at a local market. The spoiled academic also helps out at a local veterinary practice.
This interlude is ruined when the farm is raided by burglars who brutalize Lurie and gang-rape Lucy. The ex-professor wants to pursue her attackers through the law and an Afrikaans neighbour suggests going after them with a gun but the young woman refuses both options, arguing – a Portia of postfeminism and post-colonialism – that mercy must be shown to the men because what they have done to her is a punishment from her black countrymen for their long suffering under white South Africans.
Reader review: There are three sexual relationships in the book: Lurie and Melanie (consensual but in breach of teacher–student rules), with the second of their three encounters categorized in his mind as ‘not rape, not quite that’; Lurie and a female vet (consensual but adulterous on her side); and the violation of Lucy by the intruding youths. But, while the professor is treated as if he had raped his student, his daughter, who undoubtedly was a victim of this crime, refuses to involve the authorities.
As in The Human Stain, the professor resigns rather than being sacked and Coetzee also coincides with the Roth in the way that the academic scandal proves to be a prelude to a greater destruction and disgrace. Lurie’s volunteering as a farmhand can be seen as a self-imposed form of ostracism but brings him no expiation.
Never giving interviews and avoiding publicity tours, Coetzee was the most Google-proof of novelists but was known to be a university teacher and so the reader was inevitably encouraged to prurient speculation about the extent to which the fiction was personal history. Had the writer witnessed – even suffered – something like this in further education? Did he perhaps have a daughter and – if so – what was her work and where?
But, if the first way of reading fiction these days was to assume that it was telling the writer’s story, the second was to measure it against the reader’s CV. Ned often rebuked Emma for judging manuscripts – and books she read for pleasure – by the extent to which the heroine resembled herself, but he now found that he was interested only in books about the ruin of reputation, measuring himself against the protagonists.
When Michael Haneke’s film Amour was released, awarded five stars in the Guardian and called ‘deeply moving’ on the artsy broadcasts, a number of friends had refused to go, saying that they felt unable to watch a film about Alzheimer’s ‘because of mummy’ or some other personal connection. And, though Ned could see that cultural obstacle coming to him one day, it had never occurred to him that he would develop a similar problem with novels about sexual violence, especially when, as in Edinburgh, he was reading one with an impenetrable lover in bed beside him.
Early in his spell of disrepute, Ned had recognized the risk of interpreting everything through the perspective of his alleged offence. He once had to abandon a newspaper article because his eye caught a peripheral reference to the painting The Rape of the Sabine Women, although he knew that in that case, rape did not mean rape. (Linguistically, as it had the antique meaning of siege, rather than criminally or morally, he hastened to add, even in his mind
.) So, reading the sequence in which Lucy decides not to go to the police, he fought not to take it personally, but failed.
Was it possible that his generation of men had to accept accusation – even jailing – over sex as a payback for what women had suffered over centuries?
The Comedy of False Accusation
‘Bloody Hell! Hogwarts!’
Tom was pointing at the Edinburgh skyline, which for the first time during their visit was not obscured by rain or fog.
‘What?’ Ned said.
‘Just, when you suddenly see it like that, all those Gothic turrets and battlements, you see where JK got it from. The wizard academy isn’t fantastical, it’s Scottish realism. Like one of the English guys at the Uni-perversity once told me, Narnia is basically Belfast: you put one map on top of the other and the hills pretty much overlap. C. S. Lewis taught at Queen’s.’
Ned tried to concentrate on his friend’s architectural-cultural lecture but was distracted by checking the passing crowds for accusatory faces. Out in the city for the first time without veils of rain-splashed plastic, he felt conspicuous and vulnerable. In the clear evening – a rainbow crowning the glistening castle – there was no meteorological need even for the baseball cap Ned wore as a last line of defence.
They were walking along Princes Street towards Edinburgh’s upper tier; their comedy gig was on the Mound at nine. When told which comedian the men were going to see, Emma and Helen had pulled faces and selected instead a piece of Canadian music-theatre about children with Asperger’s syndrome, followed by supper at an Italian restaurant that offered the most acceptable compromise between edibility and quick service.
On the road that wound round Waverley station, young men and women with imploring expressions – the showbiz equivalent of beggars in the developing world – pressed flyers at Ned and Tom. The aspiring theatricals were already skilled in sliding the glossy paper into hands held out flatly in refusal. Watching people hungry for fame and to be on television, Ned felt like a syphilitic who finds himself in a restaurant on Valentine’s Day.
People arriving on the Mound were divided by yellowjacketed stewards into lines for the Military Tattoo, Michael McIntyre and Jim Davidson. Police stood at intervals between the first two queues.
‘Presumably the cops are here because of the Tattoo?’ Ned suggested.
‘Really?’
‘The British Army marching under floodlights without their guns. Prime target for The Evil Ones, wouldn’t it be?’
‘Oh, I guess so.’
Ned felt the rare glow of having thought something that Tom hadn’t, although his friend soon regained the conversational advantage: ‘Although I suppose they could be here to arrest Davidson again. There’s no …’
Ned’s flinching look made him stop. ‘Oh, God, sorry, Nod. I didn’t mean …’
‘I just hope that sentence wasn’t going to include the words smoke or fire.’
Looking away, Tom gestured at the soot-stained stone of the university building they were waiting to enter. ‘See what I mean? You could teach Ron how to use a broomstick in there.’
‘I never knew you were quite such a Potter scholar,’ Ned teased.
As he spoke, a woman in front turned round.
‘No choice. Becky was in the exact catchment zone.’
‘Oh, yeah. Tell that to the Traill Inquiry, you …’
The safety-catch in his brain saved him from saying paedophile here. When he made eye contact with the customer in front, she looked away. Sixtyish and wealthily dressed, she was part of his core television audience and clientele at book signings. Recognition would generally have led to a shy, polite acknowledgement of loving his documentaries. So he hoped that her failure to speak now was from kindness, but feared it might result from embarrassment, pity or disappointment.
One of the stewards walked along the line and said in the slow, capital letter tone of a primary teacher: ‘Just checking everyone in this queue is expecting to see No Further Action?’
‘Oh, Lord, no!’ exclaimed the tourist who had spotted Ned. She and her companion were redirected to Michael McIntyre. As they headed towards the much longer queue, she glanced back, perhaps to check if the television professor and his friend had made a similar mistake and were following. His choice of stand-up comedy would doubtless become part of her anecdote about his general decline in her estimation.
‘You’re sure you wouldn’t rather watch soldiers in kilts pulling cannons about?’ Tom asked. ‘Or even routines about how hard supermarket packaging is to open?’
‘No. I have to see this,’ Ned told him. ‘For, as it were, historic reasons.’
A few minutes before the advertised start-time, they were invited up the clanging stone steps and into the intricately chiselled lobby. ‘Hogwarts and all!’ exclaimed Tom, looking round.
Beside the staircase that led up to the theatre was a bar where the comedian they had come to see was standing. In a three-piece businessman’s suit, he was orange-skinned from vacation or cosmetics, and holding a glass of what looked like water as he told three other men a story that involved facial expressions and exaggerated voices. The actors Ned knew liked to be alone in their dressing room before a performance but a comic possibly needed to warm up by hearing people laugh.
The venue was a converted lecture hall, with steeply tiered seating. As the lights went down, a spotlight swung a moonrise across the stage, then steadied for Davidson to bound into it. At a certain point in the career of comedians or musicians, when the audience consists entirely of admirers, shows begin with an ovation. The one that Davidson received provoked him to claim that he had thought of leaving Edinburgh that morning, so appalled was he by the reviews in two liberal newspapers.
In honour of the comic’s debut at the Edinburgh Fringe, there was some tailored stuff featuring memories and impersonations of his late Scottish father. But the early material was a swearier version of what Ned remembered from television in the ’70s. Davidson recalled once meeting a really fat and ugly bird with two young children in a stroller. When he asked her how old the ‘twins’ were, she corrected him that they were brother and sister single births. ‘Sorry, madam,’ he apologizes. ‘I just couldn’t think of anyone who would fuck you twice!’ Cataloguing various sexual encounters, he riffed on pubic manicures: ginger women should not have a Brazilian because it made ‘their fannies look like a fish finger’. A gag about the Paralympics involved a mime of deaf runners failing to hear the starting gun.
The audience responded with loud laughter, in which Tom joined, but Ned, fearing that his reaction might be noticed and socially mediated, didn’t.
In the middle section of the set, no one laughed at all. Davidson related his arrest by detectives from Operation Yewtree over historic sexual allegations involving first two women and then, as publicity brought new claims, several more. Ned was conscious of Tom watching his reactions, in the way that Emma did during plays or films about young boys suffering their father’s death, which meant that he was trained in appearing neutrally engaged while under scrutiny. From a defendant’s perspective, he was intrigued that Davidson had applied, to different cases, all three of the available exonerations: with some of the women he had consensual sex, others he had known but never sexually, while a third group he had never met at all.
Apart from using disguises for the complainants such as ‘Scouser’ and ‘Penguin’ – required, even in a stand-up act, to respect their legal right to lifelong anonymity – the comic’s account was angrily factual, except for humorous incredulity at the proof of his intimacy with one accuser – with whom he claimed not to have had an intimate relationship – being her memory of his ‘ginger pubes’ which, as he pointed out, was a reasonable guess from his head.
The audience, though, greeted that detail with the same attentive but uncomfortable silence that they gave to the entire Yewtree routine. Ned felt that it was a creative mistake for Davidson to change his tone so severely for this part of the show; a L
enny Bruce would have made a savage comic monologue from such arrest and accusation.
Even as a deliberately serious interlude in a comedy show, there was a problem with the shaping of the tale because the outcome – a letter from the cops advising that ‘no further action’ would be taken – was anti-climactic and even non-comic narratives required a punchline.
Davidson returned to knob and fanny gags – and an anecdote about a wacky comedian who did a shit inside the guitar of a musician who was on the same bill – and the audience happily relaxed. Ned heard only the bare details of each story. Davidson was an ideal candidate for the opposite of schadenfreude. And yet his was not a clean case of false accusation; perhaps none was. The comedian’s defence was that he was a casual shagger and serial adulterer but not a rapist. This confession might be effective legally but how did it work morally and domestically? The act contained the information that Michelle, his fourth wife, was standing by him.
Ned felt even more relieved that Emma had decided to skip this show.
Friday Suicide Call (3)
At the established time on the usual day, the words Suicide Call flickered on the display. Tom, with his nickname habit, appreciated the dumb gullibility of his phone in never querying an identity entered.
He let it ring. Keeping mock office hours in his spare-bedroom study, he was reading a Kindle import of a new book on Dallas ’63, which suggested that Bobby had plotted with Lyndon Johnson to have JFK shot.
Tom watched the call being diverted to voicemail, switched the phone to silent vibrate mode, then went back to the text. The book’s hypothesis required the writer to ignore the strong evidence of hostility between LBJ and RFK (he had the advantage to be working on a period in which the fashion for triplicate initials offered an alternative to the biographical problem of the repetition of the subject’s name), which had led many earlier authors to argue that Johnson, convinced that Bobby was plotting to remove him from the ticket as Jack’s running mate in ’64, had conspired to make the president unavailable for re-election.
